The Eastern Knight (2)
The Military Committee of the Provisional Supreme Committee of the Three Principles Revolution.
Commonly known as the Wolf's Lair.
In the gloom of that cavern, the generals bent over their papers by the glow of an electric bulb, faces drawn close, and one of them asked me:
"So what you're saying is... you want us to manufacture a hero?"
"That's right."
Hero-making.
Yes—this was about Hong Beom-do.
I nodded toward Yang Heon-su, the Minister of Military Affairs, who was flicking a few sheets of paper with his fingertips and looking thoroughly unimpressed.
"Put simply, we find a handful of people from among the masses who can lead the revolution. Call it... positive heroism."
"Positive heroism."
"Is it so different from the chastity gates the old dynasty used to raise? The Western powers have a long tradition of awarding medals, too. I'm saying the army should take this opportunity to introduce a decorations system—to honor military merit."
"But what's written in this proposal..."
"You think artificially inflating one man will interfere with military operations?"
Yang Heon-su averted his eyes.
"Yes, sir."
"Then drop the merit-padding. Hong Beom-do—he's with the 3rd Regiment's Armored Infantry, isn't he?"
"That is correct, Your Excellency."
"He'll rack up achievements on his own anyway. I was worrying over nothing. Scrap the merit-padding and the staged photography in the proposal. Tell them to just act as they always have."
Even so, I made a point of telling them to take good care of Russell and Ernest—the two men who had given Hong Beom-do such favorable interviews.
"A most proper decision, Your Excellency."
"That aside."
The generals visibly relaxed the moment I rescinded the order. Come on. Did they really think I'd force my way into operational planning just to puff up one man named Hong Beom-do?
I hate mustaches. Too much trouble to maintain.
And I was a complete amateur when it came to military affairs. In my previous life I'd been a company mortarman. As if operational maps and force-status reports were going to mean a damn thing to me.
If you don't know, don't interfere. If they lose because they planned badly, I just demote them. That's not my fault, is it?
Of course, if a defeat report ever did land on this table, the Wolf's Lair would be turned upside down. But it still wouldn't be my fault.
Unlike the previous dynasty, I had granted the military the greatest possible authority and discretion—partly because I was a civilian amateur who'd taken himself out of the equation, and partly so that responsibility would fall entirely on the army.
Keep a low profile. Last a long time.
That had been my motto in my previous life.
"The next item is the opium epidemic in the occupied territories."
I set aside the report on Hong Beom-do and picked up another bundle of papers. The generals hurriedly turned to the next page. I held my tongue and let them read in peace—the Intelligence Bureau's report, which laid out in exhaustive detail the number of opium addicts in Liaodong, the cultivation fields, the distribution networks, and the black markets.
This was genuinely vital work. It belonged to the Republic's hundred-year plan for eventually absorbing Liaodong and Manchuria.
The country next door collapsed on narcotics. If we don't take that as a warning, we're idiots.
Even when the humiliating Treaty of Ganghwa was being signed, it was Koreans who had protested that opium and every other narcotic had to be categorically banned from the Japanese.
For a while the only sound was the rustle of pages turning. Then a man in a Western suit—conspicuous among all that stiff uniform cloth and shoulder braid—raised his hand from the corner.
"Minister of the Interior?"
It was Park Yung-hyo, recently elevated to that post.
"I have a question, Your Excellency."
"A question?"
Park Yung-hyo had recently had a new pair of spectacles fitted by one of the American merchants who had begun to appear, little by little, in Hanseong. He nudged the frames up the bridge of his nose with a forefinger.
"I have a rather good idea."
"Do you? Ask the question first."
"Not merely in the occupied territories, but for every narcotics crime and distribution problem the Republic will face going forward—which ministry do you intend to give the lead?"
"Oho."
It was a question that cut straight to the bone. I studied the gleam in the lenses perched on his nose.
He sees power in this.
The men who earned even a single line in the history textbooks really were a different breed. The Intelligence Bureau was still half-baked; most of the reports and intelligence summaries that crossed this table were clumsy, woolly things. And from that thin gruel he had drawn an insight like this.
I arranged my face into a look of careful consideration, then answered slowly.
"The Ministry of the Interior would be appropriate."
"I see. The police, then?"
"No. Not under the Security Bureau. We'll establish a separate Narcotics Investigation Bureau. That can be worked out in due course. Joint investigations between the military and the police would be best, of course. Now that the Sino-Korean Trade Regulations have been voided, every ounce of opium circulating inside the Republic is smuggled."
"You believe the problem originates at the border."
"I've been told that American and French merchantmen—our allied vessels—are being thoroughly inspected. That leaves Japan."
"They've known perfectly well, ever since the Treaty of Ganghwa, that importing opium into the Republic is illegal."
"There have been no interception reports so far, but keep checking. Keep reporting."
"Yes, Your Excellency."
Park Yung-hyo and the generals alike nodded readily, reading my intent not to let the matter tilt toward any single camp. By now everyone knew that I had followed the separation of powers by carving the government into still finer pieces, a many-sided system in which every organ checked every other, so that no ministry and no administrative bureau could monopolize authority.
Most of the men in this room also knew that I was using the various committees—and the Dongmaenghoe, that barely disguised government party—to suppress coups and the reactionary elements still lurking inside the administration.
The same principle held in foreign affairs. Among those who had thrown in with my executive and my cabinet, not one of them sat around factionalizing me—His Excellency is a Francophile! No, an Americanist! No, a Japanophile!—and then branding me a traitor.
I was, when it came to governing, a fairly honest man.
"Every last one of them is a robber. Robbers who beat down the price of our young men's blood."
"Most justly said."
We returned to the matter at hand, and everyone in the room sighed over the present state of Liaodong—a land that had, more precisely, become an opium plantation.
"No wonder there's famine."
The report was a shock: peasants were flipping rice paddies into dry fields to grow opium, because it paid so much better than farming grain. For Koreans, that was a genuine blow. To a people who had not yet truly tasted opium, gleaming white rice was the only narcotic the state permitted. And they were tearing up perfectly good paddies to smoke that trash? Enough to make a man jump out of his skin.
"What are the people of Liaodong eating, then? Opium?"
"Isn't that the strangest part? According to interrogations of the local population, the rice is coming up from Shandong."
"They're importing grain with this perfectly good plain sitting right here? They've lost their minds."
The Northern Army's reports and the Intelligence Bureau's reconnaissance all said the same thing. It wasn't only Liaodong. Liaoxi, where Shenyang sat, and the country beyond Ningyuan, behind Shanhaiguan—opium fields were everywhere.
"If I may add something."
The Northern Army was still maintaining order as an occupying force, and it was seeing far more local intelligence than the Intelligence Bureau. Yang Heon-su volunteered to answer the questions on Liaodong's opium situation himself.
"Under the supervision of the Political Officers dispatched by the Public Security Committee, and of the military police, we have committed every available unit to burning the fields. The seed stock is collected separately and incinerated without exception."
"And yet?"
"Quantities we never imagined keep turning up, from somewhere, constantly. In the camps holding surrendered prisoners. In the bundles of refugees processing for travel permits."
"That's hideous."
In other words, the opium fields that must already carpet every corner of the Jiangnan had spread deep into North China as well. Compared with that, the people who buried their precious opium chests in the earth or hid them in caves the moment they heard that Republican troops were burning the crop in every strip of Liaodong we occupied—those people were almost charming.
Yang Heon-su went on. Qing soldiers and civilians alike, already badly addicted, were sprawled through the occupied zones and creating a serious problem for public order. Black markets had sprung up in the cities almost overnight to handle the traffic.
"Can't you just shut the black markets down the moment you find them?"
"Your Excellency, the towns, cities, and villages we have occupied already number well over a hundred! If we station a garrison and a police detachment in every village, the main force will be weakened on the spot."
Short of troops? We had eighty thousand men deployed in Liaodong right now.
"Even with replacement regiments still streaming into Liaodong as we speak?"
"The Hyangbogun have not yet had proper discipline instilled. If they absorb that filth, they could become a poison rather than a remedy, Your Excellency."
"Good God. You're saying they could become addicts themselves."
"The sacred army of the Republic has no need of narcotics addicts in its ranks, Your Excellency."
Yang Heon-su's brows drew up. On this point, it was clear, he would not yield an inch. Faced with that iron will, I raised both hands.
"All right. I understand."
What else could I do? We had gone to war before our preparations were finished, and we were winning battle after battle. That alone was fortune enough.
I settled the question of public order inside the occupied towns by deciding to dispatch mainland police as early as possible, to fill the gap the army would eventually leave. Then I turned the map of Liaodong this way and that, studying the occupied zones painted in red.
"Manchuria is a blank."
Yang Heon-su answered my mutter.
"Mounted bandits and routed Qing troops are hiding there, but compared with Liaodong it lacks the cities and hinterland to sustain a large army. You need not worry overmuch."
"And the opium we're so concerned about?"
"They'll be planting it there as well, I expect."
"Then even if we shake down every last resident of Liaodong, it's all for nothing, isn't it?"
The bandits would just come and dump it on the black market. I could see the picture perfectly.
"If we follow that logic, Your Excellency, our army will be spending all its time burning opium fields on the far side of Shanhaiguan as well."
"This is enough to drive a man mad."
Yang Heon-su circled the suspected opium-growing regions of Manchuria, Liaodong, and North China and spoke again.
"The best course is this: the moment the border is fixed, we expel every Qing subject from the consolidated occupied territories back to their own country."
"Expel...?"
"Yes, Your Excellency. That is the army's view."
I was so startled I looked from face to face among the other generals seated beside Yang Heon-su. They only nodded, their expressions set, as if they agreed with him completely.
I couldn't believe it. I checked again.
"Expel all of them? The civilians?"
And then:
"Is this not the Republic's glorious ancient soil? The owner has changed. Telling the criminals who have been occupying it illegally all this time to get out is only natural."
Well. It wasn't wrong.
But this was going too far. Liaodong alone held well over several hundred thousand people. Were they just going to walk out quietly?
"No, wait. Do you even know what the population of Liaodong—"
"The staff dispatched by the Public Security Committee and the Ministry of the Interior are already collecting information as they issue travel permits to the refugees."
The answer came so promptly that I could only shake my head in disbelief.
"You're using the personal details recorded for travel permits for that?"
"A bonus, as it were."
"A bonus, my ass! That's a human rights violation!"
I slammed the desk and surged to my feet.
Here I was, killing myself to manufacture a hero out of Hong Beom-do, ferrying European war correspondents in so we could play the press—Our people are romantic! Chivalry is magnificent! The finest in Europe!—and the civil administration and the army had quietly colluded to draw up a systematic expulsion plan? And they were going to carry it out?
Were they out of their minds?
"What does that make me—and the Republic—when I preach the Three Principles of the People, that every nation and every people are free and equal?!"
But the real problem was something else.
"H-have we committed some error...?"
"Your Excellency?"
"Well, evacuation of occupied territory and expulsion are things other countries also—"
These people didn't know. This wasn't a performance of ignorance, a dodge to escape responsibility. They genuinely did not understand what they had done wrong.
And in that moment I felt it in my bones: the ground I was standing on was still nineteenth-century Korea.
Revolution, republic—to hell with all of it. The nineteenth century I was standing in was still the age of nationalism.
Their reaction, the whole scene, made me feel the fault was mine, and deeply.
This one's on me.
I, Syngman Rhee, a fine fellow who also self-criticizes quickly.
I decided this was an error of perception and experience—each man limited by what he had seen—and I composed my face, sat back down, and drew a breath. A rumor that the head of state was emotional was a dangerous liability in diplomacy.
"All right. I understand, for now. But the evacuation of occupied territory and the expulsions must be run as separate operations. That way this hideous news won't reach the war correspondents or foreign countries. And if it does leak, it will be easier to kill as a rumor."
"Ohh. A brilliant stroke, Your Excellency."
A brilliant stroke, my ass.
"In that case, rather than gathering prisoners and refugees together in the camps, shall we maintain separate temporary issuing offices in the cities for the refugees?"
"Hn?"
Wait. What did he just say?
Had I misheard?
Civilians. In a military prisoner-of-war camp.
I cocked an ear and asked the general who had mentioned the camps once more.
"I'm sorry—you've been holding the refugees and the Qing prisoners in the same place?"
The general who had received the question seemed to take it as an honor, an opportunity. He answered me with great diligence.
"Yes, Your Excellency. For administrative convenience we confined them in the camps, investigated them, then issued travel permits and released them."
"In... investigated?"
"That is correct, Your Excellency. They may call themselves civilians, but any of them could become irregulars. Adult males are treated, as far as possible, as deserters. We interrogate them, and only release them if no suspicion remains. Women, the elderly, and children are detained briefly and then released. They are the weak, after all. And of course we guarantee them safe passage as far as Yingkou, the evacuation port."
"..."
What had I just heard?
Auschwitz?
Civilians in a temporary camp? Interrogation and detention?
These people will be calling genocide perfectly natural next...
I was so shaken by a reality I could not accept that I turned to Yang Heon-su without thinking and pointed at the man.
"Did I just mishear that?"
"No."
"Have you all gone completely insane?!"
What kind of spectacle was this? On the face of a republic that preached the freedom and equality of the people—this fucking—!
"Haaah. Fuck."
At least I knew now. I buried my face between my knees and groaned. Yes. Thank God for that much.
As for the press, there were two newspapers of any note in the Republic, and both were in my pocket. That, at least, was fine. I pressed the generals quickly and learned that the camps had been set up well away from the garrisons. Which meant no correspondent knew what was actually happening inside them.
"Ah. I suppose we should be grateful the war correspondents haven't covered it yet?"
"Your Excellency?"
"Just be quiet. I am in the mood to grab someone and beat them."
My fists were still on the cute side, but Yang Heon-su had lived with me long enough to read my face. He knew I was genuinely furious, and he jerked his head back at once—the picture of a man declaring that he, personally, had had nothing to do with it.
I fumed for a long time, unable to let it go, then pressed my forehead and let out a long breath.
"Who, exactly? The army is too busy fighting to have cooked up a method like this... Hey. Minister of the Interior. I'm talking to you. You!"
"Hic!"
Park Yung-hyo had been trying to slip away. I caught him dead to rights, and he startled so hard he sat right back down. Only then did I understand why the usual Park Yung-hyo—the man who loved to step forward, who loved to be noticed—had been glued to a corner, answering only when spoken to and volunteering nothing.
This expulsion plan had come out of his shop.
I walked over to the corner where he had been hiding and bore down on him.
"This is a Ministry of the Interior proposal. Am I wrong?"
"Th-that is, Your Excellency—"
"I trust you have not forgotten why I granted you and the Ministry such wide discretion and authority."
"Of course not, Your Excellency! Our loyalty to the revolution has never wavered!"
In that brief exchange I took the measure of what was moving inside the government, and I took it fast.
The army was overwhelmed. The mood was festive—victory after victory—but the Northern advance had outrun every supply plan they had drawn up. The battle for Shenyang, which would finish Liaodong completely, was right on top of them, and the siege of Lushun, which would lock down command of the West Sea for good, was unfolding in real time to packed houses. And we still had troops deployed in Taiwan.
The army was in a war of its own.
Which meant:
They went to the people closest to the military who still belonged to the government—the Police Bureau under the Ministry of the Interior—and asked for a hand.
The Police Bureau, which had absorbed the old capital police, the constables, and a portion of the Pyongyang garrison, was swelling into a force that could no longer be ignored. And Park Yung-hyo's eagerness to take the lead on founding a narcotics bureau was the Ministry of the Interior building a pretext to sink its roots still deeper into Liaodong.
Caught with their hands in the jar.
The moment I saw how the pieces fit, Yang Heon-su and the army generals slid glances at Park Yung-hyo, cleared their throats, and began to mutter.
In other words: they were snitching.
"Ahem. I hear there's young blood in the Ministry these days, going around saying they can't afford to lose ground to the Public Security Committee."
"The Security Bureau has been looking rather wilted of late, I understand."
"They kept thumping their chests about some dazzling plan, so we listened—and there was a fair amount of sense in it."
"The name was Yi... Lee Wan-yong, was it?"
"!"
Excuse me. Why is that name coming up in here, right now?